Benches in Switzerland

Benches are a common form of outdoor seating in Switzerland. Their popularity arises from a long history of benches as indoor furniture and from the Swiss propensity for hiking and landscape appreciation. In urban areas, benches are found in parks and squares and along terraces and wooded footpaths. In rural areas they are found attached to traditional housetypes and barns as well as scattered on private or communally owned meadows, pastures and woodlands. They appear with remarkable consistency throughout the diverse cultural and physical regions of Switzerland but decrease in number and density across all the usaional borders.     

Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies

Ongoing debates over the significance of specialized production in ancient political economies frequently hinge on questions of whether elites or commoners controlled craft manufactures and whether the material or ideological import of these production processes was more significant in deciding power contests. Though long recognized, such queries were traditionally answered in relatively straightforward economic terms. Recently, these time-honored approaches have been questioned. An ever increasing number of authors are promoting varied takes on the causal linkages between political forms and processes, on the one hand, and patterns of production, distribution, and use of craft goods, on the other. The literature generated by these discussions is extensive, vibrant, and often confusing. Rather than trying to synthesize all reports and essays dealing with specialized manufacture, this paper highlights general interpretive trends that underlie and structure current debates. The concluding section offers suggestions for how studies of relations among crafts, power, and social heterogeneity might be pursued profitably in the future.     

Reimagining nursing's place in the history of clinical practice

This work posits how medical history might be conceptualized if nurses and nursing history was used as the analytical lens. Nursing is seen not as a separate part or subsection of medical history, but rather one that is deeply embedded in the relationships and social order of clinical practice. Nursing is an analytical category in and of itself. By approaching nursing as such a category, we enlarge "new notions of historical significance" to encompass personal, political, public, and private activities that constitute medical experiences.     

Developing a Landscape History as Part of a Survey Strategy: A Critique of Current Settlement System Approaches based on Case Studies from Western New South Wales,Australia

In Australia, geomorphological change since the late nineteenth century ensures surface artifact visibility but the contribution of full coverage regional survey to an understanding of past landscape use is limited by the lack of easily datable artifacts. Here, we describe a multi-stage survey strategy based around intensive archaeological, geomorphological and chronological studies as an alternative to traditional site-based approaches. We view the formation of the archaeological record as a sedimentary process and use a geomorphological approach to understand the history of landscape use from surface artifact scatters. We pay particular attention to recording datasets with reference to the timescales over which they have accumulated, and we discuss the types of behavioral inferences that can be drawn from the results of intensive survey, illustrated using the results from our western New South Wales research.     

Statistical Comparisons of the Osteology of Southwestern Columbidae

Columbid remains are commonly recovered in Quaternary deposits, but identification to the species level has been difficult, if not impossible, in areas where several species occur in sympatry. In the U.S.A., the problem becomes complex in the Southwest, where Neotropical species from Mexico occur in addition to the typical North American species. Twelve major skeletal elements of nine species of the Columbidae likely to be found in Quaternary deposits in the American Southwest were examined quantitatively. Discriminant analyses were used in an attempt to distinguish individual elements of the examined species. The skull, femur, tibiotarsus and tarsometatarsus of some species could be discriminated, presenting the possibility of identifying these elements to the species level. Other elements could be identified with varying levels of success, providing a cautionary note in identifying solitary elements beyond the genus level.     

Improving Coastal Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies for Integrated Coastal Zone Management: an Approach from South Australia

The global concern about human-induced climatic change and its potential effect on sea-level has dominated the debate on coastal vulnerability, particularly since a common assessment methodology was developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1991. There have been numerous attempts to use or adapt this methodology but the focus has remained on sea-level rise as the single most important issue for coastal vulnerability. This paper presents a revised and more holistic coastal vulnerability assessment methodology which incorporates spatial and temporal scales relevant to the predicted impacts of climatic change and current human-induced hazards. Three studies in contrasting coastal environments of South Australia demonstrate that there are significant regional variations in sea-level response, human-induced hazards and local planning issues and that these may present a greater immediate threat than the possibility of sea-level rise.     

Radiographic evidence for changing patterns of animal exploitation in the Southern levant

Radiographs were taken of sheep (Ovis aries) and goat (Capra hircus) metacarpals from archaeological sites in Israel dating from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) to recent times. From these radiographs the combined cortical thickness (CCT) of the bones was measured, and used to estimate sample variation in bone mass. The samples were compared by species and period, and further compared with CCT values obtained for a recent sample of ibex (Capra ibex nubiana) from the same region. For all periods studied, CCT values in goats were comparable with those of recent ibex. A significant reduction in CCT values of both sheep and goats was found in the Early Bronze to recent samples as compared with the Chalcolithic and PPNB samples. It is proposed that this reduction in CCT values is associated with the presence of older, female animals in the later samples studied, and may be indicative of an emphasis on milk herds.